edition of the _Secchia Rapita_ (Barbera, 1861).]

The _Secchia Rapita_ is the first example of heroico-comic poetry.
Tassoni claims in print the honor of inventing this new species, and
tells his friends that 'though he will not pique himself on being a
poet, still he sets some store on having discovered a new kind of poem
and occupied a vacant seat.' The seat--and it was no Siege
Perilous--stood indeed empty and ready to be won by any free-lance of
letters. Folengo had burlesqued romance. But no one as yet had made a
parody of that which still existed mainly as the unaccomplished hope of
literature. Trissino with his _Italia Liberata_, Tasso with his
_Gerusalemme Liberata_, tried to persuade themselves and the world that
they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic. But their
maieutic ingenuity was vain. The nation carried no epic in her womb.
Trissino's _Italia_ was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Tasso's
_Gerusalemme_ a florid bastard of romance. Tassoni, noticing the
imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give
his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was
possible. Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing
work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired
of the Nation which pedants had prophesied. Unity of action celestial
machinery, races in conflict, contrasted heroes, the wavering chance of
war, episodes, bards, heroines, and love subordinated to the martial
motive--all these features of the epic he viewed through the distorting
medium of his comic art.

In the days of the second Lombard League, when Frederick II. was
fighting a losing battle with the Church, Guelf Bologna came into grim
conflict with her Ghibelline neighbor Modena. The territory of these two
cities formed the _champ clos_ of a duel in which the forces of Germany
and nearly all Italy took part; and in one engagement, at Fossalta, the
Emperor's heir, King Enzo of Sardinia, was taken captive. How he passed
the rest of his days, a prisoner of the Bolognese, and how he begat the
semi-royal brood of Bentivogli, is matter of history and legend. During
this conflict memorable among the many municipal wars of Italy in the
middle ages, it happened that some Modenese soldiers, who had pushed
their way into the suburbs of Bologna, carried off a bucket and
suspended it as a trophy in the bell-tower of the cathedral, where it
may still be seen. On